Posts tagged ‘Storify’

Twitter is a fascinating source of news and current affairs that allows you to share in events from a distance. I was, therefore, fascinated to see Tweets from a recent healthcare meeting in which CNN discussed how they are having to compete with bloggers.

CNN claimed that this was due to bloggers violating embargoes on the publication of scientific data. As a science blogger, I questioned whether this naked assertion was correct?

Using Storify, I captured the Tweets and looked into more detail as to “Who cheats and breaks science new reporting embargoes?”

As readers may know, I recently attended the annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) in Philadelphia. I’m working my way through some posts from Health Journalism 2011, and at the same taking the opportunity to experiment with new social media tools such as Storify.

So far I have written posts from AHCJ on Massachusetts health care reform and the drug development pipeline. Tomorrow, I will be posting on nanotechnology and a presentation by Kacy Cullen, Ph.D from the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania – my highlight of the meeting!

On the last day of Health Journalism 2011 there was an engaging panel on social media and blogging moderated by Scott Hensley of National Public Radio (NPR).

I’m always looking for tips on what I could be doing better, so it was interesting to hear from experienced journalists on their approach to blogging and social media. I decided to use Storify to aggregate many of the live tweets, and in the process shares the tips from the session.

Storify is an interesting new tool in beta stage of development that allows you to capture social media and incorporate into a story and then embed it in a blog post. Given that Twitter posts are not kept after several days, it’s a useful way to capture Tweets that may otherwise be lost. It also allows you to bring social media together from a number of sources e.g. Facebook, YouTube.

However, there’s room for improvement given the lack of a search feature on the Storify site and to me it seems hard to find stories that others have done, unless you have a link to them. Improved search will be key to success.

I’m also not sure to what extent any content posted on Storify makes it into search engines, or is crawled by bots. Again, if your content cannot be found, then it’s social media utility is lowered. However, it’s always good to try new tools and you can read what I put together on Storify from the Health Journalism 2011 session on blogging and social media below:

I recently attended the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) annual meeting in Philadelphia. “Health Journalism 2011” offered the opportunity to hear speakers on a wide range of topics.

One presentation that by chance I attended was on what we can learn from Massachusetts, where a law was passed two years ago requiring individual healthcare insurance. Many of the features of the MA law were incorporated into the Affordable Care Act that will impact everyone in the United States.

I have used Storify to aggregate some of the live Tweets from the session, and I hope this captures the essence of what the panel presented.

[<a href=”http://storify.com/3nt/lessons-from-massachusetts-healthcare-reform” target=”blank”>View the story “Lessons from Massachusetts Healthcare Reform” on Storify]</a>

Richard Schilsky in Science Translational Medicine describes the challenges of enrolling patients into ever more complex cancer clinical trials. It is estimated that only 3-5% of cancer patients participate in clinical trials. Can social media be used to overcome barriers to enrollment?

There are many barriers to enrollment such as a lack of incentive by the physician if they can prescribe the drug off-label and obtain reimbursement, the additional legal liability, time required for research documentation and the need to follow human protection requirements such as informed consent and obtain Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval.

There’s also the issue of equipoise, the uncertainty as to whether a new treatment will be beneficial or not and the need to discuss with a patient their willingness to accept the risk that a new treatment may offer less benefit than the current standard of care. This topic is beyond the scope of this post.

Schilsky notes in his commentary that:

“trial start-up times have lengthened to an average of 2 years or longer, up to 40% of cooperative group phase III trials have failed to complete accrual and closed without achieving study endpoints, wasting the contribution of those patients willing to enroll in the trial.”

Time to market is key to the success of biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, with product life governed by patent years. Delays in time to market have a real ROI impact, and may lead to promising products being discontinued prematurely.

One of the barriers to enrollment noted in Schilsky’s highlights is “insufficient patient awareness/demand.” Can social media play a role in overcoming this?

To look at what is happening currently, I used Storify, a new tool that allows you to create stories using social media: